Starship EVO News

Let's dig into the work done of the upcoming terrain technology!

The new terrain will:

• unify asteroids, space habitat and planets under the same tech
  
• be fully deformable, which means mining and terrain sculpting to make ground bases.
  
• be integrated into the brick entity rendering system for better performance (GPU culling and batching for the tech savvy)
  
• be integrated to the collision system too, for better performance.
  

At first this new tech will replace the current asteroids, introducing mining. Then a bit later it will replace the current space habitats terrain, while planets will take a bit longer to be introduced as they require more work to generate good looking and varied terrain.

New Asteroids:
The new asteroids will be more varied and will features several ore to be mined.
Some larger big asteroids are also spawn on top of the usual field of asteroids.

Here is a preview of mining (just terrain deforming for now, I will add vfx and better mining experience).
I havent spent much time on the look for things for now and have instead focused on the technology, so no worry it will look much better!
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube] .

The technology uses an octree: an asteroid (and later a planet or habitat) first render a single chunk of geometry at a low resolution. Once the player gets closer that chunks gets subdivided into 8 smaller chunks of half the size. This continue as the player gets closer up until the minimum size of 1m per voxel has been reached.
Several challenges arise, like how to stich the gap between the geometry of two chunks at a different resolutions. You also needs to deal with the transition and blend between the geometry of the two resolutions when a node gets subdivided.

You can see the whole thing in action here. Please not how the geometry gets subdivided as you get closer:
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Tech wise it has been very challenging as several systems are now dealing with tens of thousands entities rather than a few thousands like before. It is a good news for the long term as it will also improve performance overall and allow ships with many many children entities / doors to run better.


Stay tuned, and thanks for supporting the game!
Francois

Brick Entities can now render very far away.
This means that your very large ship can be visible from a greater distance (almost infinite).
A lot of improvement to the rendering tech where done to not impact negatively performance, so please report any regression of the graphic side!

Most importantly it opens to road to replace the current space habitat with brick entities which will yield massive performance gains,
make the code base simpler and add more variety. Stay tuned!

A word on decals: decals wont render further than 1000km away (which is quite far away).
But there is still some clipping issues to be fixed, especially with large stretched and flat decals.

Thanks for playing!

A new fuel harvesting gameplay mechanic has been added.
Gas clouds will spawn close to the sun and are harvestable by the player for refuel.
To do do link (with pipes of course) a Fuel Scoop to a tank and fly inside the gas cloud.

Gas Cloud Feature:

• You need to get close to the sun to find them.
  
• Expand or retract depending on a much fuel is stored inside the cloud.
  
• Built using the latest particle system technology.
  
• Will be visible far away through a LOD system.
  
• Largest cloud can be selected as tracking target, so you can check how much fuel is left.
  

Fuel Scoop:

• Can be set to harvest or Expel in case you need to dump fuel.
  
• In case of expel a new gas cloud will be created if necessary.
  
• Can be toggled On or Off.
  
• It has three signal events for all your logic needs : [Is harvesting], [Is Expelling] and [Is Inside Gas Cloud]
  
• Has a harvest and expel particle effect.
  
• All built using DOTS technology, so it should be super fast!
  

Other features:

• HUD Fuel fuel widget has been improved.
  

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

WIP:
- Fuel rate will likely require more tuning as it might be too slow.
- The gas clouds pops-in a bit abruptly. This will be fixed once the size of the world will be reduced (that will be necessary for other reasons too).

Community Feedback:
I want to conclude this post by asking you some feedback!
I am considering implementing multi-fuel.
The basic fuel will always be available at every star and compatible with both engine and reactor, but higher tier fuel would be more rare and would provide power / range bonus for either engine or reactor, requiring more complex design to be exploited fully.
A tank could only store one type of fuel at a time.
This could be interesting and add depth for advanced players, but I fear it might be too cumbersome.

Thanks a lot for playing!
Francois

Another hotfix build following the last refactor heavy update.

Bugfixes:

• Various station generation fixes.
  
• Station generation: modules metadata reload upon generation, allowing better iteration.
  
• Light controller not working
  
• Flood light not rendering correctly.
  

Thanks for playing!
Francois

A new optimization approach to visual FX has been introduced levering on the latest engine breakthrough.
It will allows much greater performance in VFX intensive situation like space combat.
All particle systems have yet to be converted (for now Laser / Beam and multitool sfx has been converted)

New system features:

• smaller memory footprint: this will shave off ~400mb of RAM (once all vfx are converted).
  
• leverage entirely on unity DOTS: this means super fast and multi-threaded performance CPU side.
  
• completely batched (one vfx system for all instance in the world): this means better GPU performance
  
• built-in stream: VFX will unloaded when far-away
  
• easier to author and integrate: which will allows to add more vfx in the future.
  
• light are fully integrated to the engine, with GPU culling and tiled rendering. Again this means better performance.
  
• this will allow making further improvements to the engine
  

Some more tweak have been made to Light rendering:

• Falloff is a bit shorter which means better GPU performance.
  
• Some other tweaks also unlock better GPU performance.
  

Thanks for playing!
Francois